Houseplants in Basildon: Urban Precarity, Class and Housing in Oisín McKenna’s Evenings and Weekends

Oisín McKenna’s Evenings and Weekends explores urban precarity within London’s housing crisis, framing class as embodied in characters’ bodies and futures. This article analyses how housing structures job insecurity, where gig work undermines bodily and emotional stability; how it shapes sexuality and space, as unstable dwellings restrict queer identity and intimacy; and how it renders the future impossible, as precarity forces characters away from metropolitan ambitions. Through evictions, damp flats, and unaffordable rents, McKenna exposes the structural inequalities in London’s post-austerity, gentrified landscape. By combining urban studies, cultural theory, and class analysis, this article situates Evenings and Weekends within ongoing debates on urban inequality, affective class, and spatial exclusion. Ultimately, the novel reveals how the city’s housing crisis is a form of class violence that determines not only where working-class residents can live but also who they are allowed to become.